Oberheim - 50 Years Of Synth Design

Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound electronic music podcast with me, Sam Inglis. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by one of the true legends of synthesizer design, none other than Tom Oberheim. Welcome, Tom. Glad to be here. Well, it's fantastic to have you on the podcast and you're actually celebrating quite a significant anniversary this year. It's 50 years since you designed your first synthesizer. That is correct. It's not my 50th year designing electronic music equipment, that went on for four, five, six years before I built my first synthesizer. Wow. Well, I wonder if I could ask you to go right back to the beginning then and tell us the story of how you came to design synthesizers in the first place. Well, I got started as a professional engineer by accident. In 1959, when I was designing circuit boards at a little company in Santa Monica, California. It was a couple of guys that did digital computer consulting in the very early days of computers and they needed some circuit boards and I went to design circuit boards for them in the days when you put little bits of tape down on a piece of plastic and got a photograph. And I'd been there about six months and it was a great place to work because I was going to UCLA working on my degree in physics and it was only about a 10 minute Lambretta ride from that place to UCLA and I'd go back and forth. And one day the boss walked in and laid down some drawings on my desk and they for were for a device called a time code generator and that's for the JPL, which is a pretty famous outfit now and so all of a sudden I was an engineer and this company allowed me to work and go to school and go back and forth. All I wanted. So for the next 6 years I worked at this company, designing more and more complex digital systems and learning a lot about logic design and, but, the very last job I did, the year I got my degree in physics was a full blown 24 bit minicomputer, which was the best job I ever had. But I kind of got burned out on doing that stuff in the late 60s and I met a bunch of, not a bunch but several musicians at UCLA. I used to spend all my time in the music department. The music department and the physics department were two buildings that are pretty close to each other and we all graduated in the 65, 66 timeframe and I got into designing some stuff for these guys. One guy was the name Don Ellis who had a, was just forming his big band, he was later pretty famous with his big band. I built him a bunch of amplifiers and another band member, or another person from another band told me that the group needed a ring modulator - I had no idea what that was - and so I went up to the UCLA engineering library and looked through books and magazines and couldn't figure out what in the hell a ring modulator could do in music. And then I found an obscure audio article by a guy who was a close associate of Bob Moog that designed kind of a patchable sound modifying device. And if one of the, this was before Moog had done his synthesizers yet, I believe, yeah. And it, but it had a ring modulator and he told me how, or I read his article and I figured how a ring modulator works. So I started building ring modulators one at a time. And then I started making them in earnest and that was in 1970 and ended up working for a big Chicago musical instrument company that was, one of its product lines was Maestro, and they, the company didn't build much itself. It had little companies build different Maestro products for them. One company did fuzz tones and a bunch of other stuff. And so they started, I made a version of the ring modulator that could sell through music stores and met some musicians that used them and also I met a guy who was the really the pioneer for bringing the Moog synthesizer into the West coast and I met him and he showed me a big Moog and I found it pretty interesting. And about the same time I also had some young high school kids that were rock and roll fans learning to play their instruments and they had heard one of the Beatles songs where George Harrison played his guitar through a Leslie speaker and they said, Tom, can you do that? I don't have any idea how to do that, but I'll try. So that led me along the line of what finally became the Maestro Phase Shifter, which I designed and manufactured for this company in Chicago. Met more musicians that way but after seeing my, this friend's Moog, I, of course, it's hard not to be an electric engineer since I was pretty young. I was fascinated by it. So I went to the NAMM show 1971 maybe and I went by the ARP booth and saw the 2600 and I said, do you have a dealer in Los Angeles? They said no, we're hoping to set up Guitar Center, but we haven't set them up yet. I said well you know, I could be your dealer. I've got a whole Rolodex of studio musicians who bought my ring modulators and they said, well, we want, let's see, we'll wait. So a few months went by and I called 'em again and they said, oh, oh, okay. So I became the first ARP dealer, possibly West of the Mississippi River and I remember when I got my first 2600, I stayed up for about well, at least two and a half days, solid playing it, learned every little circuit, you know, voltage inverters and ring, and of course it had a ring modulator also and all this other stuff. And I got really interested in, even more interested than just selling them, but very interested in what they did. And so using some of my logic design computer stuff, I designed a digital sequencer that you can load the notes from a keyboard in at it did both pitches and durations. And in those days I, one of my best friends I met at the UCLA music department, his name, Richard, his name was Richard and Richard was a fantastic keyboard improviser and he would do a concert yearly where he did keyboard improvisations. He'd ask for a theme from the audience and then he'd play, he'd improvise that song in one of many styles. And when we talked about the ring modulator and stuff and so I put together this little system with a couple ring modulators and a Revox tape recorder with a foot pedal operated speed and another foot pedal ran the carrier of the ring modulator and he did improvisations, electronic music improvisations. And for one of those concerts - I’d been selling, of course, the 2600 by then for a year or two and I discovered that the circuit board inside the band box of 2600 had places for parts, but there are no parts in those and I traced out the circuitry and turned out to be the thing that they designed for the 2500 where you could generate two CDs from a keyboard and so you could get two note, I won't call it polyphony, but it’s, people have done that a lot recently you know. So I got this idea for taking two 2600s with two of these keyboards I’d modified for two voice or two note, to be able to play two notes and my friend Richard played around with the, he was good enough that he could, despite its crudeness, he could actually play some nice Bach inventions and whatever and we did a concert of that. And when I heard that, him playing that and here was four note polyphony, that stuck in my mind. That really, I mean, I thought that was just an amazing sound but that was in 73 because most keyboard players then had only one synth. If you wanted to use my digital sequencer you either had your choice of playing your synthesizer or having the sequencer play it, which was not too convenient, so I had this idea for the absolute, what I thought was the absolute minimum for a little synthesizer module that the sequencer could play and then you could play your 2600, or your mini Moog or whatever. So I started making those in 74 and I sold, you know, a couple hundred or something. In June of 1975 the Chicago company cancelled all their orders for ring modulators and phase shifters and two or three other pedals I was making that was, that's what I was living off of and they had some excuse for the cancelling the orders and I had to do something. Fortunately I only had a couple of employees at that point so I had heard from Dave Rossum that he had designed a digital scanning keyboard, so I contacted him to see if I could license his digital keyboard and so I took that and added some features to it and took four SEMs and cobbled it together and I had the four voice. Now I’ll shut up. For me that's the first five years, or six years Well you certainly packed a lot into those years. And one feature of the SEM that's still around on Oberheim instruments today is the characteristic filter design. Tell us a little bit about how you came up with that design. Well, when I designed it, decided to do the SEM, I had some knowledge of analogue circuitry and I certainly read electro notes and some of the other stuff, there wasn't much around. So I did it, I called up Dave Rossum for, and said if he designed me an oscillator, I called up the person designed the 2600. Denis Colin. And I asked him if he designed a filter for my module. And then an engineer that was working for me at the time, Jim Cooper designed the envelope generators and we put it all together and got it working. And when we got the first prototype working I, really about all I did was design the power supply and the packaging and I designed the front panel, or the user interface and got the first one working and it was sounding pretty good but I wasn't that happy with it and so I spent about a week with a soldering iron and a bunch of resistors and played around with the signal levels going through the chain and the oscillator to the filter, to the VCA, etc. And I tweaked those until I got the sound that I liked and that's exactly the same circuit that in1975, the same exact circuit that's now in the TEO five, in the OB6, in the OBX and a few others. Actually, it's only a few because at one point in the history of Oberheim synths we went from discrete resistors and capacitors to Curtis chips, so there was a change, but we knew the sound we wanted so anyway that's the SEM how and the SEM turned out to be pretty good. And the OB1, which was your first integrated synth, was also I think, the first instrument ever to have patch memories, am I right? Well, I thought so when we designed it but then later when I applied for a patent, I found that a little synthesizer company in the East Coast had a scheme where you could punch holes in a little piece of a card, or some kind of card and you could, that kept me from getting a patent on it. Now I had to, no I actually got the patent on that but I think it was the first time to use semiconductor technology to store patches. But the SEM not being completely voltage controlled, the original programmer that I had, well I'm sorry, the OB1 was completely voltage controlled so we had, everything was controlled, of course the SEM, I was still building 4 voices and 8 voices when we bought the OB1 out and the SEM itself was not completely voltage controlled. So that opened the door for somebody to have a polyphonic synthesizer that was completely voltage controlled and we all know who, we all know Dave, bless his heart, in the Prophet 5, which he first showed in 78. And your answer to that was the OBX. Yeah well, when, I gotta tell you one thing, by this time I had done enough business I could, I had a few people working for me, I had an engineer and I had a couple of guys doing sales. And in the, at the January or it may have been February or March in those days when NAMM had a very small show in Anaheim, the main show was in Chicago in the Summer, in June, but in early 1978 we went to the little NAMM show in the basement of the Disneyland Hotel and there was Dave and with his Prophet 5 controlled by a microprocessor. And I think I'd said earlier, I was so burned down on digital, I wanted nothing to do personally with digital circuitry. So I admired him for what he did. He had microprocessor experience from working in the industry and after he graduated, I think in the 60s and we got back to my shop in Santa Monica and nobody was very impressed except me and my other guy said, oh it's just a polyphonic mini Moog. And I thought, wait a minute, what's wrong with that? So the Prophet 5 took off like, like a cyclone and by the end of, as we approached the end of 1978, the sales that were keeping my company going, which were the four voice and the eight voice were going down very quickly and my engineer and I knew that if we didn't do something that we would be out of business because we could see not only the Prophet 5, but we saw something had to be done about making machines completely programmable to make them usable in all cases, not just in somebody's studio. So we started working on the OBX in, I think, September, October of 78 and we showed the first prototype then in June of 75 at the NAMM show in Atlanta and if we had not done well at Atlanta in that Summer of 75 with the OBX, we would definitely have been out of business, but instead by the first day of the show, we had half a million dollars in orders. And so we survived. But the OBX, there's a bunch of them around and somebody keeps them going. I wanted to ask you actually, I mean people say that different manufacturers synths have different family sounds and they say there's a Moog sound, there's an ARP sound, there’s a Roland sound and so on. I mean, do you think there is a an Oberheim sound? I'm not the person to ask. If you took a Prophet and an Oberheim put them side by side and played a similar patch I don't know, I’m not sure I’d hear a big difference because I’m not an instrumentalist, I don't play an instrument, I'm not a keyboard player. I learned the hard way, not the hard way, but I learned over the years of building stuff for musicians that musicians ears develop and they hear things that I don't hear and so I yeah, I’m definitely I think there's a difference. Of course when you look at the basic elements of an analogue synthesizer, oscillators, filters, VCA's, envelope generators, etc, there's no question that the sound of the filter is very important and so I didn't want to mess with that when I had a choice. And the stuff that Sequential has built, well the first Oberheim product Sequential built was the OB6 back five or six years ago and that has an absolute copy of the SEM filter in it. So does the new thing, the TEO 5. It's an absolute copy of this SEM filter, so I think that's important. VCA's have some effect but they're less important than the filter. I think a very important part of this is what the signal levels are as they go through. You were just talking earlier that something that was about to distort, well you know analogue, if it's truly analogue it does distort nicely, doesn't always distort like digital does, but it sort of softens, it's just sort of soft distortion and then a little less soft and whatever and that's certainly the case of what I discovered in the early SEMs, especially when I had four or eight of them to play with and look at the signal levels really had, I think, had an effect, but the filter is the big thing. The filter, whether it's 2 pole, 4 pole, but then there's a little more to it than that. You know, there's the 2 pole, 4 pole thing, but then the circuitry in the SEM filter, it's very easy for it to distort if you make the signal levels too high, but it's always distorting to some extent, you know, it's not like it's rock solid you know, 0.01% and then it goes to 20%, it’s just, it's a constant thing. And that's one of the, I think, things that's characteristic of a true analogue filter. And then of course we had another revolution in the mid 1980s when DX7 came along and digital sampling and the world seemed to turn upside down once again. What was that time like for you? Well in my particular case, at the height of Oberheims business success, we were doing by 1985, we were doing a million dollars a month and we had the Matrix 12 about to come out, which would've pushed it along because in 1985, as far as I remember, we were still building, we were building expander and the OB8 and the DMX and DSX and we were doing very well. In my case, in 1985, my trusted lawyer of 15 years gave me advice which I took, which ended up having him owning the company. That's a long, long story, but by 1985 I was no longer the owner of the Oberheim Company and, but then, totally apart from my story, the digital stuff coming in, mainly coming into the country, really changed things a lot. Everybody wanted a D50 or an M1. Different companies, some of my friends, went out of business not long after me and so things changed a lot. All the friends I consider still good friends did other things, went in other directions. By the 90s, I designed another synthesizer and put it on the market. It was called the MSR2, but it was way too much for me to handle and it was not successful because by then I was totally by myself. But then something happened in the 90s where a lot of people that were kind of in the background came to the foreground and that these different groups fell in love with drum machines and analogue synthesizers and Dave was smart enough, Dave Smith was smart enough to see this and so he got back in business in the early 2000s. And then when he got to Prophet 08 he just, things went crazy. And by then I was pretty much working in Silicon Valley and not in music at all. But I got a lot of people asking me about my stuff and then in the early 2000s, Roger Lynn and I sort of started a coffee group thing in Berkeley, California and it got to be pretty popular by people that knew about it. One day Roger said, Tom, what you need to do, this is probably 2008, he said, what you need to do, Tom, is bring back that little module you had. Oh, you mean the SEM? Yeah, the SEM. You should make some more of those. I said, oh, Roger it's expensive, it's obsolete, it's not programmable, it’s…, make it Tom. Well, I could think a lot of ways to probably improve it, Tom don't improve it, just do it the way it is. So I went ahead and started building it, and over the next couple, three years, I sold about a thousand of them, it was kind of fun. And then I got the idea to redo my favourite Oberheim synthesizer, which was a 2 voice that I did back in 1975, 76, 77. But that one I did improve things. I put in a 16-step sequencer and all the things that make it modern, you know, touch sensitive keyboard. But it was two SEMs, absolutely exactly like I'd made back in the 70s and I sold about 500 of those. I would have sold more but the company making it made a mistake that I really had to stop making them. But anyway, I watched things from afar and watched what was happening in stuff and what Dave going crazy with his stuff and then one day six, seven years ago Dave Smith, Roger Linn and I got invited to give a panel discussion at Sweetwater and got to ride back to Sweetwater on Sweetwater's Company private jet which was the trip, and on that trip Dave said, what would you think if we, Sequential he meant, would make a machine with your sound. I said that sounds great. So that resulted later in the OB6. And then we had the mighty OB-X8. By the time of the OB-X8 Sequential was owned by Focusrite and, trying to remember how it all happened, so much happened so quickly. So Focusrite bought Sequential and then a year or so later, the question of what was going to happen, the Oberheim name as other companies came along, I won't say who, and made similar things. And basically through some very hard work by Marcus Rao, who the guy that started Line 6, that worked for me earlier in the 1980s, worked to bring together Uli Behringer and me and some lawyers and Uli graciously gave me my name back and the trademarks for the Oberheim name and all of a sudden there was something worth buying and Focusrite bought that. Well, I won't say bought me, but I'm still alive and I'm still interested in and I'm happy to see what's going on with what's taken place because of that situation. And 50 years after you designed your first synthesizer, you now have a new model out there, the TEO 5. Ha ha, yeah. I guess some people might have expected that to be a cut down OBX 8, but it really isn't. No, well, it's definitely not a cut down OB-X8, it's more of a upgraded Matrix 6 maybe, or because I did do a lower cost machine about the time that the lawyer took over the company and technologies improved and the abilities to add features to synthesizers is improved over the years. And so Sequential has a great group of engineers and me when I can be of any help. And with their experience and their creativity, they put together the TEO 5. Guess what? It's got the SEM filter and it sounds great. It really sounds great. You know, what can I say? And I guess with today's technology you can cram a huge amount of functionality into quite a small and affordable instrument. But how do you do that whilst keeping it immediate and accessible for people to play? Pots and switches haven't changed but there's always ways to configure a control panel so that it does more in less space without being inconvenient, or some things over time turned out to be more important and other things turned out to be less important and people are more sophisticated, you might say. I think that as the years go by, people start out like in anything scientific, science moves along in some ways. But on the other hand the chips that we used in the early days were large one inch long and half inch wide and took a lot of space and now the chips are about as big as the cross section of a pencil and so you can get the same circuitry in a smaller space and learning how to do that to make it sound good and work for years and all that is up to experience. There's a lot of ways to do a synthesizer and some people know more than others but I think the thing that, of course for us that are in this where we were doing analogue stuff is just thanks to the dance guys and the guys that love drum machines, it crosses over into synthesizers, so we've got the demand so that you can make more of something. If you have to build 10 synthesizers at a time, they're real expensive. If you build a hundred or a thousand, they're less expensive and yet they have the same sound if it's the same circuitry. So this just, it's a kind of an interesting combination that you don't really see in a lot of industries like cell phones and other electronic equipment and cards where the technology is moving forward and nobody's looking backwards. Well, that's not our business. We're happy to take advantage of the great advances in semiconductor technology and manufacturing technology, but we don't mess with the sound. That's been tried and not always worked. I think that's a pretty great philosophy to live by. Don't mess with the sound. Don't mess with the sound. I've said this before, but if there's one thing that I've learned in 50 years is if you're not a musician, don't build a synthesizer. Now in my case I learned the hard way over time that I don't rely on my ears because I've got plenty of friends that I could go to and say, is this right or is this wrong? I’m talking about my particular case but I’m happy at 50 years, still making things sound the way they did. I mean to me in certain situations, to me nothing beats the sound of an 8 voice, the old 8 voice. I think it still sounds great and that was cobbled together out of desperation, you might say. They still sell, but they're totally impractical to use in most situations. So there's always ways to look back and see what there is to do, but I, the sound is important and I just don't rely totally on my hearing. I'm better off choosing musicians that I know can give me an honest answer, rather than relying on myself. So it is the sound, but it isn’t necessarily totally what I hear and it's worked pretty well. It's worked pretty well. Tom, thank you so much for being on the podcast with me today. It's been an absolute pleasure to meet you and I've really enjoyed looking back and congratulations on the TEO 5. I've had a sneak peek of Gordon Reed's review of it and I think he likes it very much indeed, so you've got another hit on your hands. Thank-you ever so much and good luck. Okay. Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcast website page where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.